Welcome, welcome and Go Hogs! We are from the Little Rock area. Have reservations for Devil's Den in March. I understand we have to take the long way in as we can't get in the short route with our camper. How did you like Devil's Den? This is our first trip planned to northwest AR. As you said, Petit Jean is a great park as well. We generally head south to Lake Ouachita or Lake Catherine. We are definite lucky to have some great state parks here.

You have to take the northern most exit off of I-540 North,Its a few more miles but it's not that bad.First time for us to take the trailer up there. I'm not the best at backing but my wife and I use the phones on speaker and seem to get the job done.I'll admit that we look for pull throughs. We spent a week at KC at the Worlds of fun park and it was a nice RV park. KC is a favorite place for us to vacation.

My wife has been wanting to take the kids to Crater of Diamonds as well. We had plans last year, but ended up in Kentucky to camp with some friends from Chicago. A couple good Corps of Engineers parks in central Arkansas are on the Arkansas River: Toadsuck near Conway and Maumelle Park near Little Rock. Both have good camping atmosphere and are convenient to either town. It's fun for the kids to watch barges and boats on the river as well.

We went to the Crater Of Diamonds park a few years back. It was in August and It was hotter than blue blazes! There is one shade tree down there. All we found was Black dirt! It was all the way across the state,but we did find locals there that said they had found several diamonds. One gentleman there said that he put 2 kids through college mining for diamonds there. He told me that he never found anything big but he consistantly found stones that were worth 100-200 dollars apeice. The best time to go is after a rain. I do know that they plow the fields often so that ups your chance of finding a stone.Guess I'm just not much of a diamond hunter!